By TOM PYLE | AMERICAN ENERGY ALLIANCE
President Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda was on display in Alaska recently when his top energy officials – Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin – spent a week touring and learning more about the state’s critical role and potential in our country’s energy dominance agenda. They underscored the President’s push to expand energy development and production and stood ready to make Alaska front and center. We currently have an administration that, more than any in history, wants to see Alaska succeed. Are you listening, Senator Murkowski?
When the Senate passed the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, Senator Murkowski made the right call – she voted no, declaring it was riddled with “new taxes that will burden the American people and American business for years to come.” She even went so far as to say, “There is no doubt in my mind, based on both substance and process, that the Senate should not have passed it.”
Now, less than three years later, Senator Murkowski is openly working to salvage the very subsidies and tax credits she once so publicly, and correctly, opposed.
A massive green spending spree masked as economic policy, the IRA served almost fully to prop up “clean” energy schemes. The many energy credits included were a partisan-fueled giveaway to politically favored industries.
Instead of encouraging the development of Alaska’s natural resources to deliver jobs and affordable energy for Alaskans, the IRA energy credits incentivize companies to use Alaska as a guinea pig, dropping in with pilot projects, and conducting their experiments on the backs of American taxpayers.
The truth is these subsidies are not about “innovation” or “energy independence.” They’re about Washington picking winners and losers and pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into technologies that can’t stand on their own. It’s also certainly not about the environment. Wind and solar generation require 10 times more land per unit of power than coal or natural gas power plants. Not to mention the effect of wind farms on local wildlife.
Alaska’s – and America’s – economy still depends on oil and gas. No amount of subsidized wind turbines or solar panels is going to change that anytime soon. Focusing on taxpayer-funded experiments above the sector that drives the state’s economy is both ineffective and shortsighted.
Senator Murkowski’s effort to protect these Biden-era tax credits is not leadership—it’s backpedaling. If she truly believed the IRA was flawed when it passed, then she should be working to dismantle it, not prop it up. What changed her mind?
Alaska doesn’t need more federal handouts, it needs an energy policy grounded in reality. That means supporting oil and gas development, improving permitting processes, and investing in infrastructure. It does not mean jumping on the green energy bandwagon simply because some of the wasteful money is already flowing.
Senator Murkowski was right in 2022. She should stay the course by working to repeal the IRA’s clean energy credits in the Big Beautiful Bill. It would be good for her state, her constituency, and the country.
Tom Pyle is the President of the American Energy Alliance.
Sorry, Tom, but if you’re looking for leadership on the energy front (despite what her advertisements say), you’re all out of luck. But, hey, if it’s ‘moderate’ you want, Lisa’s all stocked up and will be happy to supply all the mediocrity you don’t want, all while she smiles and says it’s “good public policy.”
Lisa Murkowski’s ongoing psychiatric transformation has been developing for decades. She has gone from being disillusioned to totally delusional. Her fraudulent elections have given her a false sense of mental security, not boldness, but timid mindlessness. She really doesn’t know who her friends are, or even if she has any friends. She is trying to explain herself in her new book, but actually, the psychiatrics involved have only deepened. I would say Lisa has a good chance of spending her remaining years in API or in retreat to some lonely town, isolated, much like her own parents have retreated to. Alaska royalty is a fiction.
Regarding the land requirement for solar, the 10 times amount does not factor in northern latitudes where panels need to be angled towards the horizon to capture the limited amount of radiation available thus they require even more land here in Alaska. The proposed one on the Kenai Peninsula is to cover 680 acres, more than one square mile, to maybe possibly sometimes for short periods generate 45 megawatts. The Houston solar farm maybe possibly sometimes for short periods generates 8.5 megawatts and covers 45 acres. The Willow solar farm maybe possibly sometimes for short periods generates 1.2 megawatts and covers 17 acres. Those projects would not be financial viable without heavy subsidies, subsidies that largely pay for panels built in Communist China with materials mined with standards that, if they exist, are minimal.
Spain recently learned what relying upon solar and wind costs when large parts of their entire grid shutdown due to an over reliance upon unreliable power sources. We can’t afford to do that here in Alaska.
So 1960’s Pyle.